Paleo Permaculture

Guest post written by: Conor O’Higgins

Turning vegetarian is the best thing you can do for the environment.” Heard that one before? I used to believe it too. That was when I was living in a city and had never grown a scrap of food in my life. Since then, I’ve traveled the world, planted trees, started community gardens, and farmed fish. I learned something I’d like to share: it’s a myth that a vegetarian diet is more sustainable than an omnivorous one. The best thing for the environment is not a food system that grows only plants – it’s one that grows vegetables, fruit, fish and animals all together in symbiosis, with minimal grains and legumes.

The vegetarian lobby argues that we use a lot of land, water and other resources to raise cattle. This is true – the way we raise cattle uses a lot of resources. But it’s wrong to conclude from that that we should stop raising animals altogether. It means we’re raising animals the wrong way.

Factory farming – where cattle are churned out like Ford Model Ts and are not integrated into an ecosystem – is indeed environmentally harmful. Then again, so is factory-style production of soy, rice or other plant-foods.

The environmental arguments against meat-eating are not against meat-eating at all; they are arguments against factory farming of livestock, which all paleo advocates should likewise oppose. In an ecological system of farming, animals are environmentally beneficial. Let’s look at why –

Plants are designed by evolution to live in symbiosis with animals. Remove animals from your farming system, and plants suffer in at least three ways. First, they are vulnerable to slugs and other pests that animals would eat. Second, they miss out on manure. Third, they are deprived of the soil-conditioning services that animals provide by digging and scratching. Farming animals intelligently will complete the ecosystem and actually boost the yield of plant-foods – something that has been proven by permaculturists all over the world. One example of this is the ‘chicken tractor‘, where chickens prepare the soil for vegetables. Plant yields jump when animals are farmed alongside them.

Of the systems of ecological farming, the most successful is permaculture. Permaculture is explicitly against vegetarianism*, rather wary of grains, and works best with a diet based on meat, fish, fruit and vegetables – more or less a paleo diet. Bill Mollison, the founder of permaculture has said, in his characteristically uncompromising style, that all city-dwellers should be forced to eat carnivorous diets. Why? Soil depletion. It is simple: when you grow a plant and remove it from a farm to feed city-dwellers, all the minerals that went into growing that plant are gone from the farm system. This rapidly depletes the soil. On the other hand, when a cow is raised in a field, the nutrients it consumes over its lifetime mostly stay in the field, so the system can sustain itself for a long time.

Some of you have probably experimented with growing your own food. I bet you started with vegetables, right? You probably found it’s quite easy to meet a good proportion of your vegetable needs without much space or effort. It’s easy to be self-sufficient for vegetables. It’s only slightly harder to be self-sufficient for meat or fish, so when people push on to the next level of food-independence, they nearly always do it by adding small livestock like chickens, ducks or rabbits. But I have never heard of anyone on a quest for self-sufficiency decide to start growing grain. Why? The math is simple –

Growing vegetables requires about 200 square feet per person.

Raising a few rabbits or chickens requires about 100 square feet per person.

Farming your own fish requires about 200 square feet per person.

Growing your own wheat (half a pound a day), would require at least 6000 square feet per person

As I said, this supposes you are using permaculture or a similar method. There are definitely wrong and wasteful ways to grow paleo-type foods, but no permaculture design, however great, will sustain a person on grains with much less than 6000 square feet.

This leaves us with two options: either we do without starches, or we get them from our veg patch in the form of tubers such as sweet potatoes. If you’ve been around the paleo movement, this advice should sound familiar! If you’re still unconvinced that grains are bloating your agricultural footprint, take a look at some ballpark figures for the yield (in tonnes per hectare) of 8 starchy foods:

Lentils 1-2.5

Rice 3-5

Wheat 2-8

Corn 7-11

Yams 15-25

Potatoes 40-50

Taro 26-65

Sweet potatoes 25-96

It couldn’t be clearer: if we want to feed the crew of Spaceship Earth with small, sustainable, garden-scale food systems – throw out the grains and legumes! Horticultural societies like the Kitavans, Yamamoto and Kuna understand this. They do not necessarily avoid starches, but get their starches strictly from (gluten-free!) tubers, not from grains. In other words, they live sustainably by following the sort of diet the paleo movement advocates.

But the environmental impact of grains gets worse. Tubers can be grown in a small space and then picked by hand, which leaves these societies with pretty easy lives with lots of leisure, unlike the bleak existence of subsistence grain-farming communities. Grains and legumes, on the other hand, need to be threshed and ground before they are edible. This requires machinery and labor.

Abandoning grains takes us a long way from a neolithic ‘farming’ paradigm to a more sustainable, more efficient, and more leisurely hunter-gatherer-horticultural ‘gardening’ paradigm. The invention of grain-based farming was an environmental and societal disaster as well as a nutritional one.

* Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual, by Bill Mollison, section 2.7

Squatchy

Christopher Williams (a.k.a. Squatchy) is a paleo aficionado, educator, personal trainer, wellness coach, and hobbyist chef. He also works as part of the Robb Wolf team.

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Comments

This is absolutely spot-on, and one of the most overlooked aspects of the paleo diet! Some of the best permaculture work I’ve seen is by Mark Shepard, author of Restoration Agriculture. He eats a totally paleo diet, grown entirely from his own land, and he raises fantastic quality meat/nuts/veggies in a sustainable way for others to do the same.

Robb, could you put a comparison of calories, nutrition or some other more relevant measure per hectare in there or as an addendum? While I agree with you on the article’s point and there are a lot more reasons than you go into for an integrated farming system, comparing dry weight items such as grains to to things full of water like tubers isn’t really a fair comparison.

Another great blog post. Permaculture is a really awesome design system for maximising yields in small areas in a sustainable way. Whilst living in Australia for a few years, I had the opportunity to do my PDC with an amazing teacher, it totally changed my views on agriculture.

Unfortunately the vegan/vegetarian view on sustainability is pretty skewed, but the morality issue clouds the facts. It’s a shame, as we share similar views in many areas, but are diametrically opposed due to the meat issue. We could do A LOT if we worked together, unlikely to ever happen.

I’m so relieved to see more of this type of information being disseminated. As ‘urban homesteaders,’ my family followed exactly the path that you outlined: in our 40 foot x 40 foot backyard, we raised vegetables and fruits before adding chickens. Our chicken flock is limited to 8 by city law — a thoughtful increase from the previous limit of 3 after our city’s 5 year food sustainability plan demonstrated that 3 chickens is insufficient to provide a family of 4 with the majority of their daily protein from eggs. As an avid bread-maker and -eater, I was dismayed when I realized how much space I would need to grow my own wheat! We still grow a little, as part of our grass-break crop rotation, but grow many more potatoes (more suitable to Seattle than sweet potatoes). I have talked with a few vegetarians who object to meat on moral grounds, but many, many more oppose factory farming. These same folks often eat non-organic, GMO soybeans as their main protein. Daily actions matter. Buying local, grass-raised meat is one option. Hopefully more people will change their habits — and their beliefs — once they learn more about the science of permaculture and sustainability. Thank you for helping with this effort!

Thanks for writing this post, Squatchy! The “eating low on the food chain” concept is one of the most dangerous and persistent myths interfering with broad-scale ecological restoration—this includes oceans, valleys, prairies, rivers, wetlands, as well as the ecosystem within the human gut!!! It is no accident that the products of industrial agriculture (monoculture) are making us sick. The mounting evidence shows that a grain-based, hi-carb diet is at the root of every single one the modern diseases that plague us. Simply more and more proof of the obvious: a healthy macro-ecology equals a healthy micro-ecology. And the reverse is equally true–as more and more people experience healing through paleo nutrition, we create a powerful incentive for the (re)establishment of the thriving and humane polycultures that heal the landscape. Anyone noticed the explosion of availability of grass-fed meat? As consumers demand it, more and more cattle are freed from their torturous confinement, offering their manure and hoof-prints back to the soil once again. As animals roam the range they evolved on, it makes perfect sense that diseases like diabetes, autism, IBS, obesity, cancer would resolve as well, as we eat the foods we evolved on. As above, so below! For anyone interested in learning more about how animals are absolutely essential to healing the planet, start out with:

This is a great article! I’ve only started learning about sustainable farming methods and permaculture. I’d like to see it go a step further and do a calories/tonne and nutritional value comparison between the starches listed. I bet those with the higher yields will also provide more nutrition.

The point stands – or is even stronger – when we use this metric. Of course, no matter which metric we pick, using one number to describe something as complex as an ecosystem will NEVER tell the whole story. (For starters, I am against dedicating an entire hectare to just one species; I say throw ’em all in together!) Nevertheless, I think this the superior caloric yields are one advantage of tubers worth considering.

As a farmer, I need to point out a couple missing inputs in this equation. Don’t get me wrong, I found your article because I’m very interested in the idea of paleo permaculture, but for rigor’s sake:

(1) The square footage per bird you give does not include the growing of grains for feed or the land necessary to let them range freely. While wildly variable, a standardized metric for free-ranging birds might be 12 per acre, which comes out to 3,600 square feet per bird. Growing the feed you need for 12 laying birds might take 1/3 of an acre, which is 1,200 square feet per bird of grains, corn, and legumes, and about twice that if you get rid of the corn and use predominantly cereals (wheat or barley). It would take the same space and poundage of feed for 100 broilers, which means you could eat about 2 per week.

(2) You neglect fertility requirements. Vegetables and intensive staple crops like corn, potatoes, and sweet potatoes require far more in the way of compost and minerals than extensive crops like grains do. Wheat is the hungriest cereal, but even it requires less fertility than “garden” crops, and barley, rye, and oats require far less than wheat.

(3) Grains have traditionally had their role on integrated subsistence farms. We can graze most grain crops at least once (with animals) when they’re young and flush and still get a good yield. Animals can clean up the crop residues, and munch undersown clovers after the crop’s been harvested. Straw is a useful farm material as mulch, animal bedding, or even for building or roofing.

I think a paleo permaculture homestead — or even farm — is a very cool idea, but it does not necessarily lead to a smaller footprint on the land. What is true is that you do away with the processing difficulties around grains, and when it comes to being a homesteader, that processing time is no joke, nor are those tools cheap which make it easier.

I think the ideal paleo approach would involve cows or other grazers, because you don’t need to grow feed. Moreover, pasture is the perfect rotation with intensive garden land — 4 years in pasture, 4 years in garden. But that, again, requires a lot of land, about 2 acres per full-grown cow. You get about 300 lbs. of consumable meat per cow when all is said and done, which should be more than enough for one person, but you need a big freezer to keep it in.

I hope this furthers the discussion. These numbers are all very rough because in reality they vary by climate, soil type, water access and so on, but they are pretty solid middle-of-the-road figures.

Matt — Good points. Although I think your animals per area calculations are quite a bit conservative in light of what we are learning from Alan Savory’s work on holistic planned grazing. In one video, a rancher was laughed at by his peers for trying 90 cattle where 45 was considered pushing max. He’s now up to 3-400 in the same space, because the ecological carrying capacity of the land has improved so much due to mimicking the historical herd-predator behavior that many ecosystems and plants co-evolved with.

You make some very valid points, Matt. My mouth dropped open when I noticed that Conor was comparing the square feet needed to grow wheat to feed one person with the square foot living space needed for chickens/rabbits (and didn’t include the space needed to grow their feed).

I agree that grains may have a place on many farms/homesteads, but we have mainly rolling hills where I live – very few acres are suitable for grains, but the landscape works well for grazing. Even on more level land, though, raising much grain is harder on the soil and requires a lot more energy than keeping the land in pasture.

While it’s true that most grains require less fertility than staple vegetable crops, that’s pretty much irrelevant for the Paleo community, as most of us won’t eat many grains anyway, due to health reasons.

I don’t believe that perma-cultured chickens would need grains. Ideally, they would get all of their needs from the insects and leafy greens which chickens eat in the wild. They might need to be fed something during the winter but they do not need to eat grain.

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